A Guide To Movies, Films and Flicks
All I want is boundless love,
All I know is violence.
-Lingua Ignota, “I AM THE BEAST”.
Internet cinema crit, particularly in the scandal-farm social media sphere, predicates on drawing a firm distinction between the Film and the Movie. These ersatz categories are centered, largely, around the Film being better than the Movie, and quality in turn measured by how Auteur a Film is. While the factors that make a production more Auteur are nebulous at best, the ones that make it less Auteur are easily listed: if there’s an explosion, if there’s a fight scene, explosion in a fight scene, Michael Myers, quick cuts, shaky cam, sex joke, too much joke (sex or not), numbers in the title (exception: Truffaut), for kids, “genre”, wizard, I don’t like it, gun, Nicolas Cage.
The great issue with this system is that cinema conventions, along with their associated denominators of quality and Auteur, are a novel invention encapsulating a minimal amount of cinema history. What do we do with our North by Northwests, our Seven Samurais, our Fistfuls of Dollar and Enters the Dragon, the thrillers and historical pieces abundant with both artistic intent and the desire to give the audience a thrill? Do they only become Films if we decide the things they did “first” are more Auteur than their successors, or otherwise because we like them and the Janus Films Blu-Ray on the shelf feels like a gold medal in Smartest Filmwatching?
Here are my smaller quibbles with the extant Movie/Film system:
- Plenty of introspective Auteur cinema is a soppy slop/sloppy sop of self-absorption and sentimentality.
- Plenty of high-octane cinema has more to say than its foot-dragging counterpart: particularly when the message is “violence works”, quantity trumps quality.
- A24 made up Auteurs to sell you Ari Aster.
- What about Flicks?
To this end, I should like to propose a novel system for categorizing Movies, Films and Flicks, based around the central theme that has haunted and fueled cinema since its inception: violence.
First of all, we have…
FILMS
A Film thinks violence is bad. A proper Film will not pussyfoot around this conclusion: as will later be demonstrated, positing that actually violence is good under this or that circumstance would transmogrify the Film into Movie, or just make a bad Film. In a good Film, violence leaves only hollow victors and dead losers. The best Films hardly even portray violence as an act but rather a ghost, an insubstantial but awfully real plague, airborne, leaving ruins of men and buildings wherever it blows.
My personal proposal for the quintessential Film is Stalker (1979). A meditative two-and-half hour trek, the titular Stalker leads his charges through the wreck of pure philosophy, making constant but detail-free allusions to harm. Surrounded by soldiers, we see shadows, hear footsteps; deep in the surreal Zone, the Stalker checks for lethal traps, then, satisfied he hasn’t triggered any, simply moves on. The climax is one graceless fistfight and an abandoned bomb. How awful it is that people value anything above each other’s safety, and that we are willing to sacrifice each other for petty want: what matters is not the gruesome shape of the sacrifice, but that there was an intent at all. All consequence, no need for action.
Films have always been in rare supply in the world’s biggest production houses, and are even more so in a monopolized landscape (which, unfortunately, does not mean we are getting good Movies either). “Drama”, “period drama”, a good chunk of romance, the rare oldie thriller, select comedy, and, arguably, most horror, is Film. A great deal of Films were produced in Europe between the 1950s and the 1990s. High quality Films are curated by highly regarded bodies such as the Criterion Collection and America’s National Film Registry. Newer Films often win Best International Picture but rarely Best Picture.
MOVIES
Movies think violence is good. The Movie does not run the risk of being transformed into its counterpart, the Film, if it tries to remind us that violence is bad: a single scene where a good guy defeats a bad guy sets the tenor of the entire narrative, and to contradict that only creates a bad Movie. In a good Movie, judiciously (or not!?) applied violence leaves the hero satisfied, no matter how hurt they were in the process, perhaps because they were so hurt in the process. The villain, well — had it coming.
My personal proposal for the quintessential Movie is Kill Bill (The Whole Bloody Affair). Frankly, I chose this one because it trips people up with the belief that, being really good, this Movie transcended its roots to become Film. Recognizing the wrongness of that impulse is what lead me to write this whole thing in the first place. This absolute Movie opens with a swift dispatching of the only character in its runtime who, however briefly, believes she can get away with mercy. Everyone else who meets the vengeant Bride understands that the only solution is violence, and they either solve or get solved. Having lost everything and with nothing material to gain, the Bride seeks only satisfaction: her actions are morally neutral at best, repugnant at worst, but god damn they feel good and that high is what every Movie chases. Kill Bill tells you what it’s gonna do in the title, and then does it. All action, ‘cuz we want the consequences.
Movies are the backbone of the cinema industry. However, the time-of-writing monopoly insists on pumping out bad ones, the worst of which (and take your pick!) have the audacity to want to be Films. Action, most thriller and mystery, a few comedies, and, arguably, most horror, is Movie. Movies were in spectacular abundance between the 1960s and the 2010s, and are still the main output of the big two industries, America and India. Movies are also the main product of smaller national industries, with currently plenty coming out of Southeast Asia. High quality Movies are curated by blogs called like “That Guy With The Chainsaw” or “24 Badass”. Movies win, like, Best Visual Effects.
FLICKS
A Flick doesn’t know and/or care about violence. This isn’t to say that Flicks don’t portray violence; it borders on impossible to imagine a narrative worth of ninety minutes of standard storytelling, set in any world that resembles ours, to not portray violence at some point. Rather, the Flick downplays the acts of violence there in, mocks them, or might even be ignorant of the fact that it is violence. Flicks thus exist on the outer edges of the Film/Movie matrix, and it’s near impossible for a Flick to blunder into being one of the other two.
My personal proposal for the quintessential Flick is Clerks (1994). The clerks are, of course, subject to class violence. The very fact that these characters are working grocery store counters, VHS rentals and petty drug deals indicates that their lifestyle borders on poverty, with little opportunity to get better. However, though getting called into work on your day off is the framing device backing the entirety of Clerks, class violence is not the obstacle, and that despite our protagonist’s constant objections that he’s “not supposed to be here today”: after all, they spend the whole Flick blowing off work to hang out with the weed man. Instead, our clerks make up their own trouble, most of which exists in their own heads, a mode of living that’s inherently disconnected from the violence guiding their lives. Sex with a corpse is a joke, and so is the resulting trauma. Comedy is the subversion of expectations: action and consequence are basically unrelated.
Flicks make up a steady portion of the marquee, though they tend to come and go with little fanfare. As you might’ve guessed, the majority of comedy is Flick; so is a sizeable portion of romance, a few “drama”, and even the Flick-as-genre. Flicks were at their peak around the 2000s, when everyone was going to the cinema but before evey production became a thing marketing demand you have an Opinion on. (Shortly after, everyone would stop going to the cinema). Still, America is possibly the single largest producer of Flicks. High quality Flicks are curated on the underspoken parts of DVD shelves worldwide.
Postscript: This system, too, has its problems. Francois Truffaut famously (and possibly misattibutedly) said that “there are no anti-war movies”, on account of a perceived impossibility to frame combat via cinematic language without deciding on a hero and a villain. Horror, too, is for people that think violence is quite bad, but also pretty cool. I welcome any notes that could polish this system.
